


The First Law Of Thermodynamics

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: Pawn Takes Queen [8]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-20
Updated: 2011-08-20
Packaged: 2018-03-07 18:10:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3178163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not like Carys thinks about her mum all the time. She just thinks about her a lot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Law Of Thermodynamics

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly set about twenty years on from the rest of Pawn Takes Queen. Luka, Bella and Fi beta'd this.

            Carys Wickes does remember her mother. She was four when her mother died, but she does remember, and this is what she remembers: warm hands and a gentle voice, soft shirts, bright brown eyes and skin like chestnuts, several shades darker than her own. She remembers these impressions, and one tiny memory, like ten seconds of scratched film in her mind – playing in the park, her mother lifting her into the swing and pushing her, flying higher, higher, _higher_ -

 

            Lorraine Wickes taught her daughter to read, she gave her kids’ books and bedtime stories and played with her and loved her more than life itself, and Carys’ memories of her stop when she’s four years six months and eight days old, because one day Lorraine Wickes went to work and she never came back.

 

            Carys remembers that, too, but she doesn’t understand the memory until she’s much older. She does not associate the simple explanation Dad and Niall gave her when she was a kid – _your mum had to go away. She went to work and a bad man who wanted to hurt lots of people tried to blow the building up. Your mum was so hurt she had to leave us even though she didn’t want to_ – with the confused and hazy impression of falling asleep on the floor of her bedroom in a nest of duvets and blankets, curled between Dad and Niall. Now, of course, she knows they were all grieving. Even if she didn’t get it at the time.

 

            Carys is usually okay with this. She has a mother, Lorraine just isn’t here. It’s sometimes complicated explaining, because Dad and Niall are together, and people assume she’s adopted, except she looks a lot like Dad. She has her Dad’s eyebrows, her Dad’s square face and stubborn chin and straight nose, and a ton of his expressions. That confuses people for a bit, especially because of the surnames; but Carys has the surname her mother gave her, and it’s _her_ surname and Carys won’t give it up.

 

 

 

            (“I mean, _why_?” one of Dad’s colleagues says to him when Carys is twelve. “She’s obviously your daughter.”

 

            “You’re underestimating Lorraine’s capacity for swimming against the tide,” Dad explains patiently and calmly, with that tiny twitch in his jaw he gets when people assume she’s not his biological kid and ask where she’s from. “And she’s _obviously_ Lorraine’s daughter, too.”

 

            “People must find it odd. Do your classmates think it’s odd?” Dad’s colleague says to Carys.

 

            Carys doesn’t like him, doesn’t like his sugary sweet tone, doesn’t like the way he’s talking about her not to her. She’s twelve not stupid. “No,” she says, flatly. “And if they do, well, _f_ -”

 

            “Carys Hilary Wickes, wash your mouth out with soap and water,” Niall informs her, clapping a hand over her mouth, but she can hear the amusement in his voice, see her Dad’s sneaking grin. She’s so not in trouble.) 

 

 

 

            Carys doesn’t miss her mum.

 

            No that’s a lie.

 

            Carys doesn’t _always_ miss her mum.

 

            She’s got an aunt, she’s got a cousin, they tell her stuff, stuff that your mum’s supposed to. Auntie Jac helps her with her hair, which isn’t at all like her Dad or Niall’s, but Auntie Jac’s had relaxed hair since she was a teenager and Adele’s hair has always been enough like her dad’s – ink-black, smooth and wavy - that she doesn’t have the problems Carys has with products and hairdressers. Dad and Niall only know the protective styles Lorraine taught them to do when Carys was small, and Carys wants a change, she just doesn’t know what sort of a change. Typically, it’s after relaxing it for the first time that she works out what she actually wants – and it’s not chemical burns, _Jesus_ , who knew the stuff was so lethal? She has to cut it all off and grow it out again, and there’s a long few months where she feels like a boy because her hair is so short.

 

 

 

            (Except the good thing about that: Carys gets caught in mischief at a family get-together and she grins broad and bright and Uncle Ditzy has to sit down in a hurry because _Jesus Christ, Niall, she looks just like you_.)

 

 

 

            But Carys has seen pictures of her mum, and Lorraine had her hair _sorted_ , she always looked amazing, and probably nobody ever told her she was scruffy and she needed to fix the dead animal on her head, which was just rude. And Carys would have liked some advice. More than that, she would have liked to hear it from her mum. Especially when she was trying making her own shampoo because the only stuff that worked on her hair was stupid expensive, and even though she’s got the recipe sorted now it was trial and error and the internet that got her there. Carys wishes it hadn’t been.

 

            There are other things too, of course. Her cousin Adele, biology textbooks and several very awkward discussions with Dad and Niall got her that far with no problems. But fixing her hair’s the main thing and it feels like a silly thing, because you should miss your mum for other stuff, right? Like buying your first bra and explaining periods and talking to you about boys or girls, or in Carys’ case boys _and_ girls. Except that’s not how it works for Carys.

 

            Carys reckons she is what she is, and that’s all there is to it.

 

 

 

            (She meets an old colleague of her mum’s, once, at a party thrown by another old colleague of her mum’s _and_ her dad’s whose name is James Lester. She feels like a fraud being at the party, just a bit; she doesn’t know the host very well, but Dad’s a friend of his and his daughter used to babysit Carys when she was small. Carys remembers Liz, and Liz remembers her, but Liz is mostly wrapped up in her wife and Carys doesn’t know anyone else there, so she drifts.

 

            “Are you Carys Wickes?” the man says in astonishment.

 

            Carys gives him a faintly suspicious look and twiddles the end of the thin bronze scarf around her hair, holding back her twists like a cooler Alice band. She doesn’t know who he is; a greyish man of medium height with a grumpy face, but he’s looking at her like she’s – she doesn’t know what. Some kind of rare curiosity. “Yes?”

 

            “Jeffrey Chilcott,” he says, and shakes hands. “Your mother used to work for me. And your uncle Niall.”

 

            “I didn’t know,” Carys says, letting go and not pointing out that Niall is her parent, not her uncle.

 

            “You probably hear this a lot,” Chilcott says with a small smile that’s pretending to be self deprecating, “but you do look very like your mother.”

 

            “No.” Carys narrows her eyes, her mother’s bright brown eyes. “Nobody tells me that at all.”

 

            Chilcott’s raised eyebrows are his only answer.

 

           “I spend more time with my dads,” Carys adds pointedly.

 

           “Touché,” Chilcott says ruefully. “ _Just_ like your mother.”)

 

 

 

            Family is kind of complicated. Carys deals with it, but it’s hard, to explain that your mum was best friends with Niall, and they had a dangerous job which made them kind of fixed friends so they  stayed really close, and then your mum met and fell in love with your dad, and they were all best friends until your mum died. And then at some point your dad and Niall got together, because losing your mum made them even closer and Niall was always like an extra parent to you. It’s really not weird, even if Carys is beginning to suspect that Dad and Niall maybe aren’t telling the _whole_ truth as she gets older and pays closer attention to the pictures of her dad and her mum and Niall; it’s okay, because they’re telling enough of it. So she keeps explaining to people and doesn’t ask questions, for now.

 

            Mother’s Day was always a weird one, partly because teachers always seem to think she’s going to break into tiny pieces on it – _she’s got no mother, poor girl, died in the Treasury bombings a few years ago_. Niall’s been her guardian in case of emergency since the day she was born, but after he and Dad got together teachers kept suggesting that she make a card for him or for Dad on Mother’s Day.

 

            Which... uh, no. _Gender essentialising_ is the phrase Carys learns from Jenny Lewis, who likes to watch Carys put the cat among the pigeons so much, and uses to awesome effect. She makes a card for Dad on Father’s Day, and another one for Niall, and she makes her lower lip wobble and her eyes tear up so she can sit out of the lessons on making Mother’s Day cards. She has ways of doing things that work better for her.

 

             The people at the Treasury building where her mum was blown up know her face; they don’t mind if Carys brings a small vase of flowers every year, like, _very_ small, and leaves it under the plaque that commemorates _all those who died in the terrorist bombing 27 th June 2020_, and pops back a week later to pick up the vase. Similarly, there’s a memorial for the civilian victims of terrorist bombings in London, and Carys has been paying for a wreath there on the anniversary out of her own pocket money as long as the memorial’s existed. She bought her own to lie at the foot of the memorial when it was first opened, out of money saved from not buying comics or sweets, and it’s a good thing nobody but her family knows that, because the picture of her aged eight laying a wreath and awkwardly trying to throw her arms around the entire memorial to hug it is bad enough.

 

              If her pocket money always receives a twenty-pound boost somewhere around the 20th of June, and her wreath is not the only one at the foot of the memorial, that’s between Dad and Niall. Carys pretends she can’t count or read. She’s good at that.

 

             Lorraine has no gravestone. She was cremated and her ashes scattered into the Thames. Her name is on the memorials in London and a bench in a quiet quad of her old college in Cambridge. She has a Wikipedia page to go with her CBE and her steady-selling books on economics and her tragic death. She has an obituary, five hundred words in the Guardian. She has a ridiculous number of diaries from her teenage years kept for Carys alone to read, and a photo album or six, covering every stage of her life.

 

            Carys has a hundred ways of remembering her and they are enough.

 

 

 

           (Carys believes in ghosts. Her dad doesn’t, or mostly he doesn’t. Niall definitely does. Carys thinks Niall sees them, too. She sees him watching something out of the corner of his eye sometimes, half-smiling like he’s sad, and wonders why. She could never get him drunk enough to make him talk, and anyway, he’s one of her _parents_. All he’ll ever say to her is _your mother loved us all_.

 

            That’s not what Carys calls an answer, and it definitely doesn’t explain the times she’s just known stuff, like someone’s tapped her on the shoulder and said _that creep, there, he’s putting something in your friend’s drink_. Or the times she’s woken up because she had nightmares and she swears she can hear someone talking to her, reading her a book too softly for her to hear the words. Or the warmth she feels when she’s frightened and lost and alone, and _Dad, Niall, please, where are you_ gets her no answer, and then she doesn’t feel alone any more.

 

            In fact it explains _nothing_ , and bloody hell Niall can be unhelpful when he wants to.)

 

 

           Carys asks Dad and Niall, separately, where Lorraine went when she died. At first all they’ll say is that she died, she went away, and then Dad awkwardly explains that Lorraine was a humanist, she didn’t believe in a God or any kind of afterlife. Neither does Carys, really, which does not stop her wanting to know, because how can people vanish into nothing?

 

           When Carys starts Physics properly, leaving plain old Science behind, she thinks she gets the answer. The first law of thermodynamics: energy is never lost.

 

          Niall grins broadly and ruffles her hair, and she yells at him a bit because she _just_ sorted her twists, but they both know she doesn’t mean it. “That’s my girl,” Dad says, and sniffles a bit and mutters about dust in his eye.

 

          “Group hug,” Carys demands.

 

          “Christ, do I have to?” Niall says, and turns down the heat on the pasta. Dad comes to her without complaint or asking questions.

 

          The hug is too tight and too stifling and it’s high summer and they’ll all bake, but it’s what Carys wants right now, and Dad and Niall pretty much always give her what she wants, within reason. She isn’t like a spoilt brat or anything.

 

          Carys’ mother isn’t here, but she isn’t gone. Carys gets that, and she’s totally okay with it. Dad and Niall love her and look after her, and she loves them back. It’s all fine, and they’re a unit, and Lorraine isn’t here but she’s still part of them. She’s part of Carys.

 

          Energy is never lost.

 


End file.
